Prescott walked to the table and sat. Neither man smiled or offered to shake hands. People at other tables in the dim, windowless room would have assumed that they had last seen each other ten minutes ago. Millikan said, “The police knew where you were staying.”
Prescott nodded. “This wasn’t a good time to come. He’s out there looking for me now.”
Millikan rubbed his forehead in a gesture of frustration that Prescott recognized as a habit that had only gotten stronger over the years. “What are you doing?”
“You know,” said Prescott. “You have news?”
Millikan rubbed his forehead again, then left his elbow on the table and leaned his cheekbone against his fist. “The police in Louisville have been looking more closely at the victims. The first theory seems to have been wrong.”
Prescott kept his eyes on Millikan without showing much eagerness or interest. “Which one?”
“The intended victim. I mean the first one to be shot—Robert Cushner Junior. It wasn’t what everybody thought. He did have a new computer-hardware breakthrough, and one of the big companies that might have felt threatened by it did know about it. The Louisville police started at the top, with the intention of pressing executives to scare them into cooperating. But all they had to do was ask, and the first one produced a signed, witnessed, and notarized agreement. They had bought his company. He was due to get a wire transfer of twenty million dollars in cash and fourteen in stock. The transaction went through without a hitch even though he was dead.”
Prescott shrugged. “So the company’s out. What else are they looking at?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They’ve done investigations on everybody who was there that night. They looked for anything odd at alclass="underline" old gigs as witnesses or jurors, drug problems, gambling problems, debts, boundary disputes. They worked on the restaurant owner, rival establishments, distributors of liquor, food, and linen. Nothing.”
Prescott said, “I still think Cushner’s the victim.”
“Oh, he’s the victim,” Millikan agreed. “Got to be.”
Prescott stirred in his seat. “I appreciate your coming to tell me that the cops have eliminated a few things. Anything helps.”
Millikan said, “You could wait for them. They’ll find out who hired this guy. They may not be able to prove it, but they’ll figure it out.”
“Probably,” said Prescott. “Someday.”
“I’m doing my best to help them. The minute we get it, I’ll tell you.” Millikan looked as though he were trying to make himself understood in a foreign language. “You don’t have to do it this way.”
Prescott said, “If you do find out, I’ll have a choice, won’t I?”
The waitress stopped at their table, picked up Millikan’s glass, and set a napkin in front of Prescott. “Another?” she asked, and Millikan nodded. “And what can I get you, sir?”
“Nothing, thanks,” said Prescott. He was staring at Millikan. “I’ve got to do some driving tonight.”
As she disappeared, Prescott leaned forward. “Do me a favor. Go home. This isn’t what you do.”
Millikan pushed the envelope across the table. “I brought you this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s why I came. The lieutenant sent me everything: copies of every report you don’t already have, copies of all thirteen autopsies, every word the cops wrote down. It’s all in there. I didn’t want to mail it to some hotel and find out you’d already checked out.”
Prescott pulled it across the table onto his lap, but he didn’t open it. He looked into Millikan’s tired, rheumy eyes.
“Thank you.” He opened his folded newspaper and pushed a single stiff sheet of paper to Millikan.
Millikan turned it over and looked at the glossy surface of the photograph. In the dim light of the bar, he couldn’t see the picture as clearly as he wanted to; his eyes hungrily traced the outlines. He could see this was a young man with dark hair, small, regular features, a thin nose and lips. The features that were unusual were the eyes. They made him want to hurry to the lobby and hold the picture under the light. They were cold, but they were not the dead, distant eyes of certain killers he had met in his work over the years. They were bright with an inner life that absolutely contradicted the expression of the lips, the unlined, untroubled forehead. It was a frightening picture. Millikan raised his eyes to meet Prescott’s.
“That’s all I have to give you in return just now,” said Prescott. “If you see anybody that looks even a little bit like that, run like hell.”
“Have you given this to the police?”
“No, but they’ve got nothing to worry about. He hasn’t seen them on television. He has seen you.”
Millikan watched Prescott step away from the table and disappear into the lobby.
It was two A.M. Prescott had read the police reports from the night of the shooting, the notes from the interviews and inquiries they had made about each of the victims. Then he had scanned the autopsy reports to see if there was anything about any of the bodies that would change his impression of what had happened in Louisville. There were surprises. They all concerned the young couple who had been killed together near the front of the restaurant.
The man’s corpse had been lying on top of the woman’s, the man obviously attempting to shield her from the shooting with his own body. The first story had been that the killer had stood over them and fired two times into the man’s back, so that the bullets passed through him into her. But the autopsy on the man said he had one shot through the back, one through the back of the head. The woman had been shot three times—the two rounds that had passed through the man first, and once through her right side, just under the arm.
The police had interviewed members of both victims’ families, a few friends, and the people who had worked with them. Nobody had been aware that this man and this woman had ever met each other. They had been in a small, intimate restaurant together for a late dinner, and when trouble had started, the woman had not cowered in a corner somewhere, and the man had neither fought nor run. He had thrown himself over her to keep her from being . . . Prescott stopped. Maybe she had already been hit.
He worked his way back through the police interviews. The man, Gary Finch, was unmarried, age twenty-eight. He worked as an auto mechanic for the Ford dealership down the street from the restaurant. He had showered, dressed in a coat and tie, and gone there for a late supper after work about twice a week.
Prescott looked at the papers on the woman to verify his first impression. She was Donna Halsey, age thirty-four. She was a stockbroker in the Louisville office of Dennison-Armistead. Prescott had a suspicion that began to grow as he scanned the interviews with people who knew her. It wasn’t what they said that interested him—none of them seemed to know anything—but who they were. Her boss was a vice president. Her brother was a senior partner in a law firm that the local cops seemed to think was a big deal. Her friends, male and female, were all professional people of some kind—a pediatrician, an officer in a bank. She didn’t seem to know anybody who wasn’t about as well connected as you could be in a place like Louisville without owning a whole lot of land with horses on it.
Prescott went back to the interviews about the car mechanic. His friends all seemed to be guys who watched games with him, went fishing, went bowling. The cops had even gone to his high school and talked to a teacher and a guidance counselor.